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I am going to be the difference, cure violence, perhaps even be touched by a nurse! It is my first-year experience and my imagination beyond measure that will see me through while I'm working toward a world without cancer.

I know I am an evil "statist," but really, I don't think the State is our salvation or anything of the sort, and often it screws up really badly.

Or really, really badly, as when a Texas town just spent $60 million on a new high school football stadium. Now, that number alone fills me with despair: while I don't think that all taxes are theft, I do think that for the most part people ought to be left to spend their money as they see fit, and taxation should only be used to take care of true collective action problems. So if the town had had a severe problem with lots of destitute people living on the street, and it spent $60 million to give them all decent housing… well, it would sound a little excessive, but maybe that would be okay. But for a football stadium? For a high school? And I assume all of these kids are already reading beyond grade level, are computer programming experts, understand the history of Western civilization, can speak a foreign language fluent…

MathMan, in the comments here, is surprised to discover my Hindu/Buddhist leanings. Let me share a story with you.

I have read a fair amount of Hindu and even more Buddhist literature. Besides my less structured readings, I once taught a comparative religions course, and as part of my prep work, I went through a semester long course on Buddhism on CD, and a semester long course on Hinduism on CD. I always considered reincarnation as a quite plausible hypothesis, and I have thought that it could fit in with the Christian concept of purgatory quite nicely. (In this synthesis, reincarnation would be the way purgatory is "implemented.")

But an experience with one of my children profoundly influenced me on this topic. This particular child was very angry for the first couple of years of his/her life. (We will just go with "his" henceforth, to avoid awkward exposition.)

While puzzling over this, at one point, rather unbidden, an image came to me: it was of him living a …

when giving you your change, first put the bills in your outstretched hand, and then place the coins on top of the bills? This is pretty obviously the wrong order: you can easily grasp the bills with the coins underneath them, but it is very hard to grasp the coins with the bills underneath them.

You know the story:
1) how the rise of Christianity destroyed Greco-Roman science;
2) how it threw us into the "Dark Ages";
3) how the church carefully monitored every scientific idea, holding back science for centuries; and
4) it was only with the overthrow of Church authority that science began to advance again.

Unfortunately, every single point in the above narrative is false, has been known to be false for many decades, and is acknowledged to be false by essentially all professional historians of science. When I studied the history of science at King's College in London, right away the lecturer, who as far as I could tell is an atheist, began debuking the above story, since it is the main obstacle to learning the actual history of science for most students.

Here is another actual historian of science noting the same problems with the commonplace narrative, and also noting that the above story is "Far from reflecting the latest considerations of the historical e…

Programmers (I am sometimes among this crew of miscreants!) are often terrible at informing users about what has gone wrong in an interaction. I have previously offered the example of text boxes on, say, an application form, that have a limit on the number of words acceptable. Almost every time I encounter one in which I've gone over the limit, the program responds, "Over the limit of X hundred words." Realize that the programmer who put up this message just counted the number of words in your message (say 700), saw this was over the limit (of say 500), and then... totally failed to tell you "You are 200 words over the limit"! ("I don't get paid to count the words for you, MF!")

Tonight I ran into an equally uninformative error message in programming in iPython. I tried to run my program, and got this:

run predator_prey.py
Syntax error ^

OK, by the looks of the message, it is a "syntax error" to type the letter "y" into …

In learning Italian, getting the prepositions right has been a maddening effort for me. I really think there is no way to get this through rules: you just keep at it until 'a' or 'in' or 'per' or 'di' etc. seems natural to you in the right spot.

But even among speakers of English across the globe the question of what preposition to use is not easy, as shown by this group of linguists fighting over whether they were dining 'on the weekend' or 'at the weekend.' And for Americans 'X is different than Y,' while to Brits, 'X is different to Y.'

Nothing, of course, but some people seem desperately to want to believe otherwise.

The theory of evolution is a fine scientific theory. It is a very good explanation of the historical process by which the current diversity of species came to exist on the earth. But, of course, as a scientific theory, it addresses the phenomenal level of existence; it has nothing to say about the substantial level whatsoever.

What Bob rightly objects to in this post is people who want to take a valid scientific theory and extend it to realms in which it has no applicability, such as metaphysics or ethics. It is as though, upon seeing a wonderful new plumbing fixture, someone concludes, "You see! I told you homosexuality is a sin!" Or encountering an innovative lightbulb, they exclaim, "It is as I thought: the universe is an indifferent place, devoid of meaning."

A particularly startling claim was made in the comment thread to Bob's post, and found some backing there. "Evo…

"Now when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very corners of your field, nor shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. Nor shall you glean your vineyard, nor shall you gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the needy and for the stranger. I am the LORD your God." -- Leviticus 19:9-10

The context of the quote is the Lord laying down a series of laws to Moses for the Israelites. This passage declares that the poor have a right to this minimal subsidy from the better off, and that the better off have no right to withhold it.

The Bible, at least, does not endorse the view that any property taking without the consent of the property owner is theft: sometimes, others have a right to part of one's property.

Here is what I found fascinating: the second graph -- what a beautiful way to display this data! -- and what it shows: from 2009-2013, among advanced economies, only Iceland, Estonia, and Ireland have had better increases in their employment growth rate than the United States.

So everyone who is complaining about US unemployment remaining high under Obama: I would stop.

An actual historian looks at a pop "history" of science column and discovers it is about as accurate as an explanation of evolution that says, "And one day a fish grew legs and walked up onto the land."

And Christie even missed a problem with the pop history account, in which Potter wrote: "...how the young Newton, sent home from school at Cambridge to avoid the plague of 1665, was sitting under a tree one day, saw an apple fall to the ground, and, in a flash of insight, came to understand the workings of gravity."

Christie notes that "the flash of insight" part is absurd, and it took Newton another twenty years to put his thoughts in publishable form.

But the problem Christie misses is the idea that Newton ever "came to understand the workings of gravity": he did not. He devised a formula describing how objects under the influence of gravity would behave. But he had no model or theory of how gravity was producing this behavior, a fact…

Here is a great anti-reductionist paper, in which the author demonstrates that:

* Temperature is not equivalent to the particular mean molecular kinetic energy of a collection of molecules, since any collection will always have such a mean but it still may not have a temperature:

“The appearance of the temperature as an argument in the Boltzmann distribution function
ni = n0e-Ui/kT
is therefore precisely what it seems to be, a macroscopic determinant of a microscopic condition without which a gas does not have a temperature.”

* Water is only a collection of H2O molecules in its gas phase. Even the purest of liquid water will contain many hydrogen and hydroxyl ions. So even such a simple substance as water does not reduce to H2O.

"For example, methyl ether and ethanol share a Hamiltonian, the quantum mechanical description of their energetic properties. Nevertheless, they are very different molecules. Ethanol is extremely soluble…

"Information asymmetry among the economic players generates an incentive for non-cooperative strategies. Specifically, we assume that the producers’ control on the means of production of the companies allow them to extract rents from them at the expense of the sector of investors that do not enjoy such control (the creditors), who in turn impose limits on this “predatory activity” by subjecting the corporate leadership through creditor controls, resulting in dynamic process analogue to the classical Lotka-Volterra Predator-Prey model."

"From a financial markets viewpoint, the implication is of course that everyone could be buying a stock that each one of the investors privately thinks is overvalued, but which nevertheless keeps soaring because the purchase decision is not made on the basis on one's individual assessment of the asset value itself but of everyone else's assessment: in short, this interpretation says that, in a financial 'bubble', an asset price would go up because everyone is buying it, and everyone would buy it because it is going up, regardless of its fundamentals."

This definition seems sound to me, and contra Scott Sumner, it shows how we can have a bubble even if we cannot reliably profit from the fact that it exists: we have no idea how long people will keep buying an asset because everyone else is buying it.

The Long Island College Hospital has been threatening to close for some time now, as it loses millions of dollars per month. Some people in the neighborhood I've been very worked up about this--I don't know why, as it is a terrible hospital. In any case, I just saw posters around the neighborhood saying "Governor Cuomo, we need a hospital, not more condos."

Two observations:

1) I bet these same people complain about how housing costs in our neighborhood are getting out of hand.

2) My neighbors protesting the closing of LICH, of course, already have housing in the neighborhood. To someone who wants to move here but can't find a place, a few more condos might not seem like such a bad idea.

I will now defend Hayek against the ignorant attack of E.J. Dionne, who recently wrote: "In [Hayek's] view, the policies of Franklin Roosevelt led down what Hayek called the 'Road to Serfdom' and were thus objectively comparable to those of Hitler or Stalin."

Note the weasel words "objectively comparable." Even Dionne is not quite so brazen as to claim that Hayek thought these policies were "objectively the same." But then just what is "objectively comparable" supposed to mean? That they can be compared by some objective criteria? Well, any set of policies can be so compared!

Dionne means to imply that Hayek thought Roosevelt's policies were the same as those of Hitler or Stalin, but without actually saying it, so when someone points out he is talking rubbish, he can retreat with "I just said comparable!"

"You are right, the idyll of peace and virtue of which our philosophers sing is about as real as a fable. But look what lies hidden behind these words, and you will see that an oligarchy is arising, ready to defeat and replace the one in power. The victory of the new oligarchy is certain because energy and strength are on its side." -- Vilfredo Pareto, The Rise and Fall of Elites, pp. 38-39

Reading Pareto just give me a whole new perspective on the libertarian "movement." Of course a world of entirely voluntary interactions is a pure fable. That many people like believe this fable is understandable: what really needs explaining is the large amount of funding behind it. But looking at all the talk of a world of peaceful cooperation as a smokescreen for the rise of a new oligarchy makes it comprehensible.

"I am fighting for a world without coercion" is going to motivate many more people than is "I am fighting for a world in which the Koch brothers and…

As I adjust the volume on my TV at night, trying to keep it as low as possible, for sleeping others, while still audible, for me, I find there certain numbers at which I just cannot rest.

Let's say that 30 was just a bit too loud. I can turn the volume down, but I can't turn it down to 29. At 29, I feel I am teetering on a pyramid supported only by 1 at its basis. A volume of 29 is completely unstable! But at 28, ah, now that's comfortable: I've got 1, 2, 4, 7 and 14 all holding me up. There is a volume with which I can relax on the couch.

Landsburg's whole post was an exercise in deliberately missing the point of what your opponent is saying, but this part was especially bad:

"I am dismayed by Father Wildes’s blindness to the clear analogy between being forced to work someone else’s land and being forced to serve someone else’s lunch."

Okay, there indeed is something about these two situations that is analogous: both parties are being placed in a legal situation in which they are forced to choose between two options, each of which they would rather avoid.

This slave is being faced with the choice: pick cotton or die.

The restaurant owner is being faced with the choice: serve people of all races lunch, or... don't run a public dining establishment.

So, while there is some analogy, the situations are far more dissimilar than they are alike. No one, after all, is forced to run a public dining establishment. (No one is forced to live either, but that is sort of a sine qua non for doing anything else.) On…

It was refusal to contribute to public expenses that for him was clearly a crime:

"But as regards attendance at choruses or processions or other shows, and as regards public services, whether the celebration of sacrifice in peace, or the payment of contributions in war-in all these cases, first comes the necessity of providing remedy for the loss; and by those who will not obey, there shall be security given to the officers whom the city and the law empower to exact the sum due; and if they forfeit their security, let the goods which they have pledged be, and the money given to the city; but if they ought to pay a larger sum, the several magistrates shall impose upon the disobedient a suitable penalty, and bring them before the court, until they are willing to do what they are ordered." -- The Laws, Book XII

By the way, the point of this post is not to prove or even argue that any or all governments can justifiably collect taxes: that is a separate argument. No, what I am…

"If a person wishes to find anything in the house of another, he shall enter naked, or wearing only a short tunic and without a belt, having first taken an oath by the customary Gods that he expects to find it there; he shall then make his search, and the other shall throw open his house and allow him to search things both sealed and unsealed." -- The Laws, Book XII

I've had it! I woke up today and realized I had just been dreaming about a series of Internet ads. What's even worse is that I suspect Google had placed them in my dream, and the NSA knows I had been looking at them.

I mentioned Chris House's model of science in a previous post. But now I want to comment on a different aspect of its oddity. (And my goal here is not to pick on House, but on the view of science he has presented, because I think it is too common.) If you recall, House's model is this:
The scientific method goes something like this:
Observation
Formation of hypotheses
Testing/evaluation
Repeat
If you can follow these steps then anything (even economics! even macroeconomics!) can be studied scientifically. When economics is at its best it truly is a science.
The aspect I wish to point out in this post is that ever achieving any success at explaining anything plays no part, for House, on whether any endeavor is scientific.
Want to do "scientific" astrology?
* Observe that the planets, moon, and sun move around in the sky relative to the "fixed stars."
* Form an hypothesis: "When the moon is in the seventh house / And Jupiter aligns with Mars / Then …

Something that really works for me: I cook quite a bit. A great time saver and mass preventer has been to put a large Tupperware on the counter near my cutting board. I can generally prepare an entire meal before it's filled. Instead of a dozen trips to the trashcan, I make one. If the scraps are all vegetable, I will often bag them and throw them in the freezer, to feed to my worms at a future date.

In the first few lines, we are told that we know the names of all the "traditional" reindeer. (The tradition does not stretch back all that far, but never mind that.)

Then we are asked, "But do you recall / the most famous reindeer of all?"

Now, wait just a second. I can see where we could recall the names of many reindeer, but forget the name of "the most important reindeer of all," or "the most noble reindeer of all," or something like that.

But isn't the phrase "the most famous reindeer of all" pretty much equivalent to "the most recalled reindeer of all"? So, if it is a given that everyone knows the names of all those other reindeer, but doubtful that they know Rudolf's, isn't that pretty good evidence that he is not "the most famous reindeer of all"?

I just wanted to get that off my chest, so I can get back to exploring the commonality among…

"The origin of cities, which developed from extended families which included both children and servants. We find that cities were naturally founded on two communities, the nobles who commanded and the plebeians who obeyed: for these two parts make up the entire polity or law of civil governments. I shall show that the first cities could not have arisen at all merely on the basis of simple nuclear families." -- New Science, pp. 16-17

What is that blue stuff they have put all over the snow? It is not so much the blue stripes themselves that are disturbing, but the way they run and leak down the slope. All I can think of when I see it is what happens when you flush if you have one of those toilet sanitizers installed.

There have been a number of explanations put forward, new policing techniques and the waning of the crack epidemic among them. But I think the most important explanation has been largely overlooked: planners (mostly) stopped mucking about poor neighborhoods.

To understand my point here, consider Jane Jacobs:
Statistical people are a fiction for many reasons, which is that there treated as if infinitely interchangeable. Real people are unique, they invest years of their lives in significant relationships with other unique people, and are not interchangeable in the least. Severed from their relationships, they are destroyed as effective social beings--sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever.
In city neighborhoods, whether streets are districts, if too many slowly grown public relationships are disrupted at once, all kinds of havoc can occur--so much habit, instability and helplessness, that it sometimes seems time will never again get in it's licks.
She goes on to quote Ha…

"expectations, a manifestation of subjectivism" -- Ludwig Lachmann, Expectations and the Meaning of Institutions

Most economists today are "subjectivists": that is, they believe that, say, value, or expectations (as above) are "subjective" phenomena. This idea is often associated the Austrian School, but it is held widely outside that school.

The term "subjective" is an unfortunate choice for what is being talked about here. For instance, my expectations have a subjective aspect, in that they are my expectations and not yours, and in that they are expectations about an uncertain future, rather than matters of "mere" fact. But they have an objective aspect as well, in that, so far as they are articulable at all, I can state them in our common language and share them with you (so they are not merely mine), and that, in so far as they are expectations and not mere fantasies, I mean them to be my best guess as to a future, objective state…

In The Laws, Plato offers a somewhat bizarre criterion for the right population size for the polis: maximize the ways the total number of citizens can be divided into equal-sized groups:
Let’s assume we have a convenient number of five thousand and forty farmers and protectors of their holdings… divide the total first by two, then by three: you’ll see it can be divided by four and five and every number right up to ten. Everyone who legislates should have sufficient appreciation of arithmetic to know what number will be most use in every state, and why. So let’s fix on the one which has the largest number of consecutive divisors. Of course, an infinite series of numbers would admit all possible divisions for all possible uses, but our 5,040 admits no more than 59… which will have to suffice for purposes of war and every peace time activity, all contracts and dealings, and for taxes and grants. (Penguin Classics, 2004: 159-160)
There you have it: the ideal state should have 5040 citiz…

Yup: one thing masking the hot hand, in the way the original "debunking" was done, is that in basketball the defense quickly sees that a player is hot, and adjusts to defend them better. In baseball, only one player is "up" at a time, so you really can't shift extra defense to that player, and here the "hot hand" shows up robustly.

"There is a clichéd view of history encouraged by bad teaching that presents the subject as the memorising of long lists of dates that somebody has designated as being significant, 55 BC, 1066, 1492, 1687, 1859, 1914 etc., etc. Now whilst in reality history is much more concerned with what happened and why it happened than with when it happened dates are the scaffolding on which historians hang up their historical facts for inspection."

I tell my students this every time I teach historical material: importance of these dates is not that you know exactly which year Luther broke with the Catholic Church or Constantinople fell, but that one understands the sequence in which such events took place. Otherwise, history becomes similar to trying to watch Memento.

Interesting post here:
In 1618 the Jesuit astronomer Orazio Grassi showed by observation and parallax measurement that the comet of that year was indeed supra-lunar driving another nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian theory of comets. Galileo, who due to illness had been unable to observe the comet, was urged by his claque to enter the arena with his opinion on the nature of comets. Galileo then famously launched an unprovoked and extremely vitriolic attack on Grassi condemning his work and defending what was basically a version of the Aristotelian theory. It was one of Galileo’s less glorious moments, far from using mathematic to criticise a doctrine of Aristotle’s Galileo was defending Aristotle’s theory of comets against an astronomer who had used mathematic to disprove it.
So, in this case, someone from the Church was disproving a theory of Aristotle's while Galileo was dogmatically defending it.

Contra Noah Millman, who recently claimed, "we can’t rely naively on an Aristotelean teleology which we now know has no empirical basis" (God knows what he meant here!), teleology pervades modern biology, and there is absolutely no sign it can be gotten rid of. Take this report of recent sloth research in the NY Times: I find at least the following uses of teleology in explaining what the sloths are up to, with the key teleological words highlighted:

"[the three-toed sloth] has carved out a remarkably ingenious mode of life in the treetops" (Something is ingenious in that it achieves an end very economically.)

"Why then does the sloth take such a risk every week?" (For what end?)

"They started by trying to understand what would compel the sloth to brave the dangers of a weekly visit to ground zero." (To what end would it do so?)

"Rather, they assumed, it was to favor a critical component of the sloth’s ecosystem, the pyralid moth. The desc…

You must've seen this a number of times: some libertarian dismisses complaints about inequality by saying, "What does it matter if inequality is growing, so long as the poor are getting wealthier in an absolute sense? To worry about one's relative wealth, to resent another for doing even better than one is doing oneself, is simply envy."

There are two things to note here: first of all, not all worry about increasing inequality is based on envy. Republican theorists throughout the centuries worried about great economic inequality because they felt it made republican politics impossible: the very rich could easily buy the allegiance and votes of the very poor, who would not act as independent republican citizens, but as clients of their wealthy patrons.

But let us grant that some of the worry about inequality is based on end. That does not mean we can dismiss it lightly! Here is Aristotle on the issue: "Inequality is everywhere at the bottom of faction, for in ge…

"From these considerations it is evident that the state belongs to the class of things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. He who is without a state, by reason of his own nature and not of some accident, is either a poor sort of being, or a being higher than man: he is like the man of whom Homer wrote in denunciation: 'Clanless and lawless and heartless is he.'" -- Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Section ii

Anarchists often like to point to the decline in character of various states over time as making a case against the state tout court. But Aristotle documents this sort of decline at great length: he would be unmoved. Claiming that because states, like all natural objects, are subject to decay and corruption, therefore we should eliminate them, is like saying that because our bodies decline with old age, they should be eliminated!

On the high holy day of Americanism. Days of celebration and feasting, a binge of consumption this evening, paeans to our military heroes, riotuous musical celebrations: an ancient Roman would have had no problem identifying our most important religious holiday.

"Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God — a light, voice, odor, food, embrace of my innerness, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part." -- St. Augustine, Confessions

"In the attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me

"I have spent my life
Seeking all that's still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me

"In the book of love's own dream
Where all the print is blood
Where all the pages are my days
And all my lights grow old
When I had no wings to fly
You flew to me

My suspicion grows that sortition would be the best among practicable changes to the American Constitution. How about this for a way of eliminating the pain of our three-year long presidential campaigns? Choose the president by drawing lots among the 100 US senators and 50 state governors. Have the person serve a single three-year term. Repeat.

Sure, we might get some presidents worse than those we are likely to get with an elective system. But surely we would get some better presidents as well. And just think: no primaries, no conventions, no campaign ads! That has to be worth it.